I’ve written before about the growing consensus among experts that the Internet’s underlying communications routing algorithms are fundamentally unscalable, so I am delighted to have CAIDA’s routing research group led by Dima Krioukov achieve some fundamental routing research results worth extensive media coverage. We have not solved the Internet’s routing scalability problem, but these recent discoveries will help that cause.

After many revisions of earlier (much longer) drafts, and help from professional referees and editors, our study of how complex networks are naturally navigable (hint: it’s their bizarrely non-random topological structure!) led to a publication in Nature (to paying subscribers, admittedly not the most efficient way of routing information, not to mention doing science, but Nature has to pay these expert editors somehow). I was reluctant to blog about it here since I can’t link to the Nature version directly, but it’s also too exciting not to tell you about! Curious non-subscribers can rely on the media coverage, find a friend with an .edu address, read the submitted draft, or email us asking for a copy.

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